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Featured in Development

As part of our core values of sharing knowledge, the InfoQ editors were keen to capture and share our book and article recommendations for 2018, so that others can benefit from this too. In this second part we are sharing the final batch of recommendations

Featured in Architecture & Design

Tanya Reilly discusses her research into how the fire code evolved in New York and draws on some of the parallels she sees in software. Along the way, she discusses what it means to be an SRE, what effective aspects of the role might look like, and her opinions on what we as an industry should be doing to prevent disasters.

Featured in Culture & Methods

Mik Kersten has published a book, Project to Product, in which he describes a framework for delivering products in the age of software. Drawing on research and experience with many organisations across a wide range of industries, he presents the Flow Framework™ as a way for organisations to adapt their product delivery to the speed of the market.

Featured in DevOps

The fact that machine learning development focuses on hyperparameter tuning and data pipelines does not mean that we need to reinvent the wheel or look for a completely new way. According to Thiago de Faria, DevOps lays a strong foundation: culture change to support experimentation, continuous evaluation, sharing, abstraction layers, observability, and working in products and services.

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Versioning of services is something which has been a cornerstone problem of SOA. There are many examples over the years of experiences gained and shared, but little in the way of concretely comparing and contrasting different approaches. Jean-Jacques Dubray has written about the experiences of his team in this area and some equations they have developed to try to illustrate the differences.

"Don't version unless you absolutely must, and it is rare that you absolutely must" says Mike Amundsen in a series of API design workshops he held recently. Amundsen describes the "USE" paradigm for API design focussing on usability, scalability and evolvability. He describes the three most common styles of API implementation and how they compare to these principles.

"To avoid the confusion caused by renumbering releases", Oracle has announced that it is adopting a new numbering scheme for JDK 5.0, JDK 6 and JDK 7. "The next Limited Update for JDK 7 will be numbered 7u40, and the next 3 CPUs after that will be numbered 7u45, 7u51, and 7u55.”

Ross Mason, founder of MuleSource expressed his frustration with OSGi: "OSGi is a great specification for middleware vendors, but a terrible specification for the end user." He argues that OSGi just isn’t ready for the developer yet as it is too difficult to completely make it invisible to a developer.

The problem of how to version services in a REST-based environment is something that comes up time and again. This time Ganesh Prasad offers a proposed solution based not on modifications to the service URL but on the fundamental reason behind versioning in the first place.

Martin Fowler has conducted a survey on ThoughtWorks’ software development mailing list to determine how some of the version control systems (VCS) are perceived by developers. He also wrote a review of most prominent VCSes comparing centralized and distributed systems.

In this article Stu Charlton examines the various options available for versioning RESTful services which he prefaces by saying “These can be tricky concepts to describe, and I don't really want to write a small book on this topic”.

MindTouch announces the ability to publish content from any Microsoft Desktop application to its collaborative industrial wiki. New user functionality includes: one-click publishing from any MS application and in-place editing of Microsoft Office. The new functionality is delivered as, Aurelia Reporter, Desktop Connector, and MS Word and MS Outlook connectors.

Versioning database schema along with your .NET code is essential for managing volatile codebases especially when employing continuous integration. Ruby on Rails accomplishes this with a popular solution of abstracting DDL SQL into Ruby commands. Similar solutions are available in .NET with third party libraries.

Back when Visual SourceSafe was the de facto version control for Windows developers, remote access was a major problem. Products like SourceOffSite were a necessity for anyone working remotely. While globalization and unstable fuel prices continue to drive increases in telecommuting, Microsoft is still neglecting this sector, leaving opportunities for smaller companies like Teamprise.